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Alex Jones

I lead teams at the intersection of strategy and design. Autodidact. Polymath. Barbecue acolyte. I start fires (the good kind).

Design

Replacing the Save Icon

Floppy Disk IconThe Save icon – that little ol’ floppy disk that exists in nearly every application sitting on your computer and on the Web. A representation of a piece of technology so utterly out of date that it’s meaning has shifted away from its physical existence into a concept of safety and permanence.

As a means of storage it was convenient by the standards of the day, but not necessarily that reliable and yet we’ve held onto it as a symbol, in large part because everyone who uses a computer recognizes it. So I recognize the fact that we’re unlikely to actually change it any time soon, I thought it would be fun to explore alternatives, so I asked the members of Refresh Austin, those who follow me on Twitter and my friends on Facebook for their ideas on a replacement. Those conversations generated some great ideas, which I present to you.

The Question

I asked “If it were up to you to change the old floppy disk as the “save” icon across all Web and desktop apps, what would you choose?”

The Answers

Physical Representations

Hard Drive icon Several responses recommended a hard drive, replacing one form of physical media with another, more accurate version. Though as William Yarbrough noted, it may not work as well for apps in the cloud.

safe-icon.png Keith Aric Hall was the first of many to recommend a vaults or safe. I like this idea as it reinforces the concept of “save”. As Frank Robinson noted, those also imply encryption or file-locking, so he suggested a two-drawer filing cabinet.

Terry Brown brought up the idea that since the Open icon is often an arrow pointing out of a folder, then having an arrow point into the folder would make sense for Save.

entry_saved.png Michelle McGonagle recommended a document with a checkmark and then took a larger step outside of the normal bounds by suggesting a treasure chest or empty jar, both of which are technology-agnostic. Keith noted that many CMSes use the document with a check icon to denote “Approve for Publishing”, which could be problematic.

Mental Concepts

box_address.png Clouds and Boxes proved popular, often accompanied by an arrow.

Diana Dupuis suggested a red “S” in a thin black circle.

The response from Steven Harms is too good to not quote outright:

The notion that is important is the locking of bits into a static form: stored in a cloud, stored on a disk, stored on a CD. The trouble is that those icons would be “lock” or “frosty-ness.” The former is visually synonymous with “security” and the latter with Wendy’s, so neither has quite the right visual glyph-set.

Other Notes

Annette Priest brought up some great points, including the fact that we’re on the verge of needing to replace phone icons as well. She also noted that perhaps we should look at a shift towards gestures for the action instead of an icon. Follow a certain pattern with your mouse or device and your work is saved.

Ryan Joy brought up the point that sometimes “save means ‘save draft’ or state and other times it’s intended as ‘publish'”. So, a bigger question may arise as to how and if we differentiate those concepts via icons.

What Do You Think?

A definitive answer was never the point, rather the conversation is the key, and it has been great so far. I’d love for you to jump in with your ideas to keep this going!.

Credits

All icons except for the safe, which is from VisualPharm are available as a part of the Flavour Extended Icon set by Oliver Twardowski.

Type on the Web – An Evolutionary Shift

For designers and anyone interested in typography on the Web, I highly recommend you check out Web Font Specimen and the A List Apart article “Real Web Type in Real Web Context” that explains it. As we near a point where real typographic controls and options are available to us, its pivotal time for professionals to step up and gain (or remember) skills that haven’t been of use on the Web. The gap between good and great designs and designers will grow and the differences will be much more apparent at a glance and in the details.

If you haven’t had a chance to play with Typekit or learn about the various font embedding options (see The Potential of Web Typography: and Bulletproof @font-face Syntax) recently layered into browsers, now’s a good time to fatten up a few brain cells.

Designing Milk

The New York Times is running a great article titled Solution, or Mess? A Milk Jug for a Green Earth (thanks to Sarah Kampman for posting it to the IxDA list). In the piece, Stephanie Rosenbloom covers a major shift in the packaging of new milk jugs recently introduced to the shelves of Walmart and Sam’s Club.

The New \"square\" milk jug in action. Photo from The New York Times
Image taken from The New York Times Article

There are a couple of very interesting aspects to the story. The first is the customer response to the new design (some love it, many hate it, most seem to be unsure) and the change required in their usage (some “feel like novices at the simple task of pouring a glass of milk”). The second is the benefits delivered by the new design: increased shipping and storage efficiency, reduced cost for the manufacturer and the customer and significantly reduced environmental impact.

It is very hard to introduce changes to an existing product or service, all the more so when it is as entrenched in day-to-day life as the common milk jug. I’m really curious to see how the new packaging is received over the next year or so and how it will be tweaked to meet customer needs.

On a side note, does anyone else think the word ‘milk’ sounds weird? Say it a few times: milk milk milk. Weird.

Creative Bridges, Coworking & Communities

This started as a quick comment on Alex Hillman’s post Creative Agency, which quickly grew so long that I realized that I had begun writing a post of my own, so I’ve shifted it to my site so I don’t hijack Alex’s discussion (plus I don’t post often enough).

Please read Alex’s post prior to reading this one.

So, Alex’s ideas set my mind-gears a’spinnin’. He covers several aspects of building a community that is beneficial to its members but also to its clients, uniting several concepts that drive me personally, and I believe drive communities around the globe.

A couple of coworking initiatives (LaunchPad, Conjunctured) are growing here in Central Texas, which I think will mesh well with our various Web and creative groups like Refresh Austin, which in turn play a large part in sharing knowledge and connecting members of the professional creative and Web communities. That said, we’re a disparate community, which can be both good (an abundance of creativity and different perceptions and solutions of challenges) and bad (harder to spread the word and unify), and often times the individuals, whether they work for themselves or sit amongst hundreds in large enterprises aren’t able to rely on each other to augment their strengths.

Some love design, others front-end development, or back-end coding. Some dig deep into the perfect turn of phrase, while others concentrate on the most effective way to monetize a product or service. Some of us like to translate between the various cultures. We’re different, which is very good. But we could do more to help each other.

Alex highlights some of the most glaring gaps amongst our profession:

  • Creatives who don’t take responsibility for “leading the client just as much as we are leading the project and the result that the end user experiences”
  • Independent creatives who may not have the business background, the time or the personality to look out for themselves on the business front

These are large gaps, but they are addressable by the right communities, some of which exist, others of which we need to being forming.

Bridges

So, we need to connect these communities:

  • Independents and corporate designers/developers – it’s amazing how different these experiences can be, and both groups will benefit from the sharing of knowledge
  • Experienced and new professionals – connect the energy, vigor and will-not-stop drive with experience and knowledge (business, and yes some political). We have to tap into the excited professionals – no cynicism
  • Business professionals and creative professionals – business folks would love to tap into the fountain of ideas that make up a creative world and the designers and developers will gain valuable skills from their counterparts making it much easier to navigate the world of contracts, time lines and expectations
  • Open source developers/communities and businesses – As Alex notes, “being an open source software developer does not, and should not, condemn ones self to a life of poverty”, which follows up on Whurley’s Opensville post.

Chief among my questions to the community is to learn what are the first steps we should take to move forward building this new creative agency platform and the other pieces required to move our communities forward? CitizenAgency and Indy Hall have an edge as established, physical spaces with strong communities, but I think Austin is an ideal setting for this as well and could quickly contribute.

So where to?

Spec Work, Pixish, Design Contests and Unicorns

Adam Howell sums up my thoughts on Pixish quite succinctly. Sure, the concept sounds great at first, as noted on the Pixish site, the community is set up as “a way to engage creative people online to submit, judge, and source amazing images.” Nice until you dig into it, just a little bit, and realize that a set of designers are all working on the same project, only one of whom will get paid. Even worse, “paid” may be a prize that is worth far less than they should have been paid.

Choices

Now, there’s a part of me that believes that it’s up to individual designers to decide to participate in something for which they may not be paid. But, in this case, as has been noted many times over, spec work weakens the profession, promoting the inexpensive option over a quality piece. Clients will view the talent pool as relatively equal, opting for a crap shoot instead of finding the right match for their needs. We do have an obligation to keep our industry strong.

For Those Starting Out

Some believe that this is a great opportunity for budding designers to build a portfolio, but as Adam notes, “We’ve got, you know, the web. Blogs. Youtube. digg/reddit/lots of other lowercase social sites. There are no longer just three ways to showcase your talent — there are three bajillion. And if you aren’t getting noticed, sorry, you either aren’t trying hard enough or you suck.”

Harsh? Yes.

True? You bet’cha.

So, do design contests have any real value? I think so. Competitions oriented towards students and amateurs to help them fill out a portfolio are great, as are contests that may benefit a non-profit, as long as the results of the contests isn’t used as a business deliverable, much less as a part of branding. That a disservice to the client who deserves nothing but the best representation of their brand and services; and it’s a disservice to the designer who should be properly compensated for their efforts.

Value

In this same vein of respect for the designer and the clients, I had a conversation recently with someone who had worked in marketing at a large tech company and was not willing to pay a designer the going rate (actually the lower end of the spectrum) for a Web project. This potential client told me that were he to interview someone who designed a site like Apple.com, he would automatically consider them out of his league. So, even though he respected and acknowledged their skills, he wouldn’t try to find a way to harness those skills, that designer would be set aside because they were too good. Anyone who wasn’t at that tier were then lumped together, as they couldn’t impress him, which means that they were charging too much.

He’s chasing a unicorn: quality and experience on the cheap.

Oh, and this is for a project that he is passionate about, and will represent him to the world. He seemed like a perfectly nice guy, but what does this say about the image he will project?

What does it say about the designers and clients using Pixish?

Quick Note

Derek Powazek has given a lot to the Web community, and I have benefited from his work in the past, so while I have a lot of respect for him, that respect doesn’t change the fact that I disagree with the concept of Pixish.